AI Business Plays

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Online and software businessesClaude (Opus agents) + dougs-cli

Have an AI agent clean up your books in an afternoon, then approve every change

Picked and checked by Olga Pearson, host of The Practical AI Show · Published

Result

self-reported

In one afternoon on his real company books, uncategorized operations went from 183 to 4. The agent pulled 22 missing invoices from Gmail and attached them, wrote about 60 changes, surfaced 3 overdue VAT returns, and, before a VAT refund claim, went through all 34 foreign software invoices and fixed every one booked wrong.

Tom Eberle ships apps from Paris. His French accounting software, Dougs, had no public API. So he had Claude Opus agents build an unofficial, open-source command-line tool for it (245 tests, about 30 hours from idea to npm). Then he let it work on his real books. Nothing reaches Dougs until he approves the plan. Months with a filed VAT return are never touched, and every write is read back and checked. It doesn’t file VAT or replace his accountant. It does the legwork.

Who did it

Tom Eberle (@eberle_tom)App business, Paris (books on Dougs)Tom Eberle on X · Oct 14, 2026

Try it now

  1. Connect your agent to your accounting software (an official integration if there is one) and to your business inbox, read-only.
  2. Ask it for a plan first: every uncategorized transaction, every bank line with no receipt, and anything that looks booked wrong.
  3. Let it find missing invoices in your email and match each one to a bank line by amount, date and vendor. It shows you the list before uploading anything.
  4. Approve the plan, let it write the changes, and keep closed months (filed returns) off limits.
Copy-paste prompt
Help me clean up my company’s books in [accounting software]. Read-only first: list (1) every uncategorized transaction with your suggested category, (2) every bank line missing a receipt, with the matching invoice you found in my business Gmail (match by amount, date and vendor), and (3) anything that looks booked wrong, like VAT on reverse-charge foreign software invoices. Don’t touch any month that already has a filed tax return. Show me the full plan and wait for my OK before writing anything.

Make it run every week

A play works once. Turn it into a routine in three small steps:

  1. Run it once and check the result yourself.
  2. Give your AI a schedule. Tell it when to run this play (every week, or every month) and to message you with what it found before you act.
  3. Keep a log. One line per run: what was checked, anything flagged, what you did.

See how owners turn plays into systems →

What to watch out for

Self-reported. His tool is unofficial and not affiliated with Dougs, and a homemade connection can break when the software changes. Keep your accountant on filings. Build it with Page: a simple invoices page so clients can pay you on time.

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